Children and adolescents who watch a lot of television are more likely to manifest antisocial and criminal behaviour when they become adults, according to a new University of Otago study published online in the US journal Pediatrics.

 
The study followed a group of around 1000 children born in Dunedin in 1972-73. Every two years between the ages of 5 and 15, they were asked how much television they watched. Those who watched more television were more likely to have a criminal conviction and were also more likely to have antisocial personality traits in adulthood.

Study co-author Associate Professor Bob Hancox of the University’s Department of Preventive and Social Medicine says he and colleagues found that the risk of having a criminal conviction by early adulthood increased by about 30% with every hour that children spent watching TV on an average weeknight.

The study also found that watching more television in childhood was associated, in adulthood, with aggressive personality traits, an increased tendency to experience negative emotions, and an increased risk of antisocial personality disorder; a psychiatric disorder characterised by persistent patterns of aggressive and antisocial behaviour.

The researchers found that the relationship between TV viewing and antisocial behaviour was not explained by socio-economic status, aggressive or antisocial behaviour in early childhood, or parenting factors.

A study co-author, Lindsay Robertson, says it is not that children who were already antisocial watched more television. “Rather, children who watched a lot of television were likely to go on to manifest antisocial behaviour and personality traits.”

Other studies have suggested a link between television viewing and antisocial behaviour, though very few have been able to demonstrate a cause-and-effect sequence. This is the first ‘real-life’ study that has asked about TV viewing throughout the whole childhood period, and has looked at a range of antisocial outcomes in adulthood. As an observational study, it cannot prove that watching too much television caused the antisocial outcomes, but the findings are consistent with most of the research and provides further evidence that excessive television can have long-term consequences for behaviour.

“Antisocial behaviour is a major problem for society. While we’re not saying that television causes all antisocial behaviour, our findings do suggest that reducing TV viewing could go some way towards reducing rates of antisocial behaviour in society,” says Associate Professor Hancox.

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that children should watch no more than 1 to 2 hours of quality television programming each day. The researchers say their findings support the idea that parents should try to limit their children’s television use.

This research emerges from the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study. The Study is run by the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Research Unit, which is supported by the Health Research Council of New Zealand.

ᔥUniversity of Otag

ᔥ istock photo

High levels of drinking have repeatedly been shown to predict divorce. The most cited explanation for this is that excessive alcohol use disrupts daily tasks and functioning, and increases spousal conflicts. A study of the effects of drinking among husbands versus wives, and of similar versus dissimilar drinking in couples, has found that both level of drinking and compatibility in drinking can have an influence on divorce.

 
Results will be published in the May 2013 issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research and are currently available at Early View.

“On average, divorced people drink more than married people,” said Fartein Ask Torvik, a researcher at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health as well as corresponding author for the study. “To some extent, this is due to increased drinking after a divorce, but people who drink heavily also have a higher risk of experiencing a divorce, so heavy drinking likely interferes fundamentally with the quality of marriage.”

“Heavy alcohol consumption is a problem of great public health concern in most Western societies,” added Ellinor F. Major, director of the division of mental health at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health. “It often leads to dysfunctional marriages and divorces. The present study adds to our understanding of the predictive value of alcohol use, and particularly of discordant alcohol consumption for marital dissolution.”

Torvik and his colleagues used data from a previous health study, in which all inhabitants in a Norwegian county were invited to participate in a health study between 1984 and 1986: 19,977 married couples partook. All participants provided information on alcohol use and mental distress. Cox regression (“time-to-event” analysis) was used to study the risk for divorce during the next 15 years, using demographics and mental distress as covariates. “There was one earlier study of this issue,” said Torvik, “but we had a larger sample and a longer follow-up period.”

“Essentially, the more people drink, the higher is the risk of divorce,” said Torvik. “In addition, the risk of divorce is lowered if the spouses drink approximately the same amount of alcohol. This is not only true for those who drink excessively – there is also a reduced risk of divorce if both spouses abstain totally from alcohol. Also, we found heavy drinking among women to be more strongly associated with divorce than heavy drinking among men.”

“This latter finding is of major interest,” said Major. “For instance, the risk of divorce is estimated to be tripled when the husband’s level drinking is low and the wife’s drinking is heavy, compared with couples where both drink lightly.”

“There are several possible explanations for this,” said Torvik. “One of them is that women in general seem to be more strongly affected by heavy drinking than men are. Thus, heavy-drinking women may be more impaired than heavy-drinking men. It is, however, important to note that heavy drinking is much less common among women than among men.”

“Heavy drinking among women is also less acceptable than among men in our society,” said Major. “A wife’s heavy drinking probably also interferes more with general family life – that is, the caring role of the mother, upbringing of children, etc. Perhaps the husband is more apt to the leave the spouse than is the wife when major problems occur. These factors may account for the higher risk for marital dissolution when the wife is a heavy drinker than when the husband is a heavy drinker.”

“Research on alcohol use and relationships should always include data from both spouses,” said Torvik. “The interaction between the spouses is too important to ignore. Likewise, clinicians working with this population should be interested in the alcohol use of the spouse.”

“Couples who intend to marry should be aware of the drinking pattern of their partner since it may become a problem in the future,” added Major. “Someone with a light or moderate alcohol use, who has a spouse who drinks heavily, should encourage that spouse to change their drinking pattern into light or moderate level if the main concern is a lasting marriage of good quality. Good advice probably would be to encourage a similar pattern of moderate or light drinking in both spouses.”

“Furthermore, while our results indicate that compatibility in drinking is important with regard to divorce, a couple with two heavy drinkers still has a higher divorce risk than couples consisting of light drinkers,” noted Torvik. “I would also like to add that we have only been looking into divorce – alcohol may lead to other social or health problems.”

“Most couples in the present study have children,” said Major. “It would be of interest to study the benefits and disadvantages for the children if parents choose to stay or leave a marriage because of discordant or concordant heavy drinking. From the children’s point of view, parental divorce brings a lot of suffering, but nonetheless, marriage dissolution might be preferable for some children rather than parents staying in a marriage with poor quality.”

ᔥ
Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research (ACER) is the official journal of the Research Society on Alcoholism and the International Society for Biomedical Research on Alcoholism. Co-authors of the ACER paper, “Discordant and Concordant Alcohol Use in Spouses as Predictors of Marital Dissolution in the General Population: Results from the Hunt Study,” were: Kristin Gustavson, Mariann Idstad, and Kristian Tambs of the Division of Mental Health at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health; and Espen Røysamb of the Division of Mental Health at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, and the Department of Psychology at the University of Oslo. The study was funded by the Research Council of Norway. This release is supported by the Addiction Technology Transfer Center Network at http://www.ATTCnetwork.org.

Seems harmless enough and unfriending someone on Facebook may be as easy as clicking a button, but a new study from the University of Colorado Denver shows the repercussions often reach far beyond cyberspace.

“People think social networks are just for fun,” said study author Christopher Sibona, a doctoral student in the Computer Science and Information Systems program at the University of Colorado Denver Business School. “But in fact what you do on those sites can have real world consequences.”

Sibona found that 40 percent of people surveyed said they would avoid in real life anyone who unfriended them on Facebook. Some 50 percent said they would not avoid the person and the remaining 10 percent were unsure. Women said they would avoid contact more than men.

The study, published this month by the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, was based on 582 survey responses gathered via Twitter. Sibona found six factors that predicted whether someone would avoid a person who unfriended them.

• If the person discussed the event after it happened.
• If the emotional response to the unfriending was extremely negative.
• If the person unfriended believed the action was due to offline behavior.
• The geographical distance between the two.
• If the troubled relationship was discussed prior to the unfriending.
• How strong the person valued the relationship before the unfriending.

 
“The number one predictor was whether the person who said the relationship was over talked about it to someone else,” Sibona said. “Talking to someone is a public declaration that the friendship is over.”

Those who felt they had behaved badly offline and were being punished for that through unfriending also tended to avoid future contact.

“The gender finding that showed women tended to avoid the person who unfriended them more than men was interesting,” Sibona. “But we really don’t know why this is.”

The study highlights how relationships are changing as the world becomes increasingly connected by the Internet. Americans now spend about 25 percent of their time online using social networks like Facebook which has over a billion members. The result is that traditional face-to-face communication is giving way to more remote online interactions which have their own rules, language and etiquette.

“The cost of maintaining online relationships is really low, and in the real world, the costs are higher,” Sibona said. “In the real world, you have to talk to people, go see them to maintain face-to-face relationships. That’s not the case in online relationships. ”

Also, in the real world when a friendship ends it usually just fades away, Sibona said. On Facebook, it can be abruptly terminated with one party declaring the friendship over.

“Since it’s done online there is an air of unreality to it but in fact there are real life consequences,” he said. “We are still trying to come to grips as a society on how to handle elements of social media. The etiquette is different and often quite stark.”

In 2010, Sibona authored a study on why people are unfriended on Facebook. He found the following top four reasons.

Frequent, unimportant posts.
Polarizing posts usually about politics or religion.
Inappropriate posts involving sexist, racist remarks
Boring everyday life posts about children, food, spouses etc.
Sibona said his current study demonstrates the power of being ostracized on social media.

He cited one experiment showing that subjects who experienced such ostracism had lower moods, less feeling of belonging, less sense of control and reduced self-esteem.

“People who are unfriended may face similar psychological effects…because unfriending may be viewed as a form of social exclusion,” Sibona said. “The study makes clear that unfriending is meaningful and has important psychological consequences for those to whom it occurs.”

ᔥᔥUniversity of Colorado Denver